One of America's most wanted fugitives, a Chicago ear, nose and throat specialist who has been on the run since 2004 after allegedly cheating patients and Medicare out of billions of dollars, has been discovered by police living in a tent in the Italian Alps.
Forty-six-year-old Mark Weinberger is now in hospital in Aosta, suffering not only from the cold but from a neck injury sustained when he tried to stab himself with a box-cutter after being arrested. He now faces extradition to the United States where lawyers for insurance companies and angry patients want him prosecuted for fraudulent billing and performing unnecessary operations.
The Caribinieri, tipped off by a mountain guide, found Weinberger's hideout at the base of a glacier on the Italian side of Mont Blanc. He was surviving the sub-zero temperatures on a diet of tinned food and melted snow heated up on a portable stove.
It is not yet clear how long he had been there. Reports over the past five years have placed him in France, Monaco and even China.
He disappeared in September 2004 after taking his wife, Michelle Weinberger, and other members of her family on a "holiday of a lifetime" in the Greek islands. One night, while sleeping with his wife on a powerboat in a Mykonos marina, he slipped away, taking his passport and money, and, as far as the authorities and his family are concerned, has never been seen again.
"I put my hand on his side of the bed, and I remember feeling it empty," Michelle told NBC television.
Michelle met her future husband - 12 years her senior - in 2000, when he was already a successful "nose doctor" running his own practice, the Weinberger Sinus Clinic, in Merrillville, Indiana, just south of Chicago. "He just swept me off my feet," she said. "He was the kindest, most gentle man I had ever met."
He was also - apparently - very well off, earning $200,000 a week performing between seven and 15 operations, according to Michelle. He proposed to her during a trip to Rome and they married in 2001. They enjoyed a lavish lifestyle in Chicago, employing maids and a cook at their West Delaware Place mansion, and holidayed frequently in Europe.
Then, in 2002, one of his former patients died from throat cancer. The woman's lawyer filed a complaint that Weinberger had not only failed to diagnose her cancer but had carried out an unnecessary operation on her sinuses, the cost of which was met by her medical insurance.
The lawyer was then contacted by dozens of other patients claiming that they too had had operations they thought were unnecessary. With another lawyer filed similar malpractice suits on behalf of 25 other patients, Weinberger appears to have recognised that the game was up and in the summer of 2004 announced the trip to Greece as a special 30th birthday gift to his wife.
After he disappeared on Mykonos, it turned out that the Weinberger practice owed $5.7m. It also transpired that he had been charging for state-of-the-art $40,000 sinus operations supposed to last two hours, but had actually been performing outdated procedures that took only 25 minutes. According an Indianapolis lawyer, David Cutshaw, whose firm represents more than 100 dissatisfied patients, this enable him to grind patients through his clinic as if they were on an assembly line.
In his absence, Weinberger has had his medical license revoked and been indicted by a federal grand jury on 22 counts of fraud, including billing insurance companies for endoscopic sinus surgeries he never performed.
His wife Michelle remained loyal at first. "I hope he's safe, and I still love him," she told the Chicago Tribune in October 2004. "We can relocate. We can live on an island in a hut."
But she never said anything about a tent in the snow. Within a year, she had filed for divorce. She told CNN's Larry King in August 2005: "I think that his fragile ego and the narcissism and onslaught of criticism that came from the lawsuits just caused him to show, you know, cowardice and just turn tail and run basically."
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